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Zeitoun, famed Hurricane Katrina protagonist, arrested again

Abdulrahman Zeitoun

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, 56, was booked into Orleans Parish Prison on Friday evening on four counts of violating a protective order, records show. The arrest comes nearly a year after ZeitounÃ¢ÂÂs acquittal of charges that he tried to kill, and offered to pay someone else to kill, his ex-wife. ZeitounÃ¢ÂÂs trial shocked those who remembered the bookÃ¢ÂÂs portrayal of the coupleÃ¢ÂÂs loving relationship, his heroic efforts to help stranded residents and his subsequent wrongful incarceration, possibly due to his Middle Eastern descent.
(Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office)

Kathy Zeitoun walked out of her Uptown rental property Friday afternoon to a sight she said brought her back to a moment in 2012 when she thought she was going to die at the hands of her ex-husband.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the once-celebrated protagonist of the Hurricane Katrina bestseller "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers, was in his van, blocking her car on the street, she said. She immediately ran inside and called police. He was soon arrested on four counts of violating a protective order, which bans him from approaching her, their kids and their properties, records show.

The arrest comes nearly a year after 56-year-old Zeitoun's acquittal of charges that he tried to kill, and offered to pay someone else to kill, his ex-wife. Zeitoun's trial shocked those who remembered the book's portrayal of the couple's loving relationship, his heroic efforts to help stranded residents and his subsequent wrongful incarceration, possibly due to his Middle Eastern descent.

"It scared the crap out of me," Kathy Zeitoun said Friday evening, as her ex-husband sat in Orleans Parish Prison for the night. "It put me back on Jackson and Prytania again. He stopped in the middle of the street, blocking the driver's side of my car again."

She said he had pulled up much the same way while she was sitting inside her parked car one July 2012 afternoon near Prytania Street and Jackson Avenue, before he smashed her windshield, chased her, choked her and struck her with a tire iron until bystanders pulled him off her. He was charged with attempted murder, as well as offering $20,000 to a fellow inmate, while jailed in connection with the beating, to finish the job.

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo acquitted him of both charges last July, saying prosecutors had trumped up charges because of Zeitoun's fame.

Since then, Kathy Zeitoun said, she has avoided seeing her ex-husband, though she fears he is going to attack her again. On Friday, she said, she was walking out of a property at South Claiborne Avenue and Robert Street to her car around 4 p.m. when she saw her ex-husband's van parked in the middle of the street, blocking her driver's side door.

"He was staring at me, and we made eye contact," she said. "I was shaking, shaking, like shakin' bakin'. You always prepare yourself, but then when it happens, you panic. You get this thing inside you that says, run, run, run, like a deer in headlights."

She sprinted into the house and called the police. She also grabbed the 9 mm Taurus she bought herself last August, shortly after Abulrahman Zeitoun was released from jail after a year behind bars.

He was booked Friday evening with four counts of violating protective orders, records show. It was unclear what the basis behind the four counts was exactly, as police said specific information and court records would not be available until Monday.

Kathy Zeitoun argued that he should have been booked with more counts, though, saying she has called police "10 to 12 times" in the past four months to report her ex-husband's apparent violations of her restraining order. She claimed he has repeatedly approached their properties, spoken to tenants and tried to contact her and the children. She also alleged he has committed "random acts of weirdness," such as chopping down a tree at one of their properties on Dart Street in Broadmoor, and blocking the entrance to a shed with cement blocks.

But the police have not responded with urgency, she said. Most of the times they came out, she said, the officers refused to write a report, telling her they didn't believe there had been a crime committed and she should "take it up with the judge" overseeing the restraining order.

"I'm scared to death," she said. "He's trying to trick everybody like he's not up to anything, but nobody knows him like I do. He's going to try something with me."

She said she believed his acquittal, coupled with what she sees as a lack of enforcement of the restraining order, is leading him to believe he could get away with attacking her again.

"There's a pattern here and it's escalating," she said. "Before, he would drive past the property. Then he'd stop by and go inside when no one's in there. And then to driving by and waving. And then to driving by and stopping in front of me. So what's the next step? The next step is attack. It only escalates."

Police spokesman Officer Frank Robertson III said his records showed Kathy Zeitoun had only called police four times so far in 2014, and that each time police responded appropriately. "Officers took immediate and appropriate actions on every occasion they were called out to make a law enforcement decision," he said. He noted police officers "have no control of" the subsequent prosecution of charges.

He said officers were called out by Kathy Zeitoun in both January and March, and did not write any reports, but "took appropriate actions based on the evidence provided to them."

In April, he said, officers wrote a report for violation of protective orders. In a separate incident that month, he said, officers wrote a report for a domestic disturbance. He said he could not provide further or more specific information until Monday.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun was released from jail by Saturday morning, records show. He did not respond to messages seeking comment left on his cell phone. Richard Barzan, the attorney who represented Zeitoun in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, did not return calls. His former criminal defense attorney, J.C. Lawrence, said he no longer represents Zeitoun.

The estranged couple divorced in February 2012 and is now battling over their assets and children in a Baton Rouge court. A judge there granted Kathy Zeitoun sole custody over the kids, ages 7, 13, 15 and 18, and management over the estranged couple's shared nine rental properties. Kathy Zeitoun claimed she wants to settle by dividing the properties, but her ex-husband refuses.

In the meantime, Orleans Parish Civil Court Judge Regina Bartholomew has issued a permanent protective order that bans Abdulrahman Zeitoun from contacting his ex-wife and children or approaching any of their co-owned properties. The judge said at an October hearing that she could later amend the order.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun told a NOLA.com | Times-Picayune reporter in October that he never wanted to kill his ex-wife. "I feel like she turned all the world against me," he said. "I never hurt her. I broke the glass windshield. I hold her against her wish. Everything else is a lie."

He said he missed his children, whom he hadn't seen since his initial arrest in July 2012. "It's killing me. I feel like I have no life. ... Nothing matters anymore."

In a reference to the five years he served in the Syrian army's special forces in the late 1970s, he added at the time: "If I want to do what she think, nothing can stop me. I'm trained very well. I know very well how to do what she accuses me of wanting to do."

The initial domestic-violence accusations came as a shock to readers of "Zeitoun." The 2009 nonfiction book, one of the most critically acclaimed chronicles of Katrina, portrayed the couple's supposedly loving bond that endured through post-storm injustices. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is described as a hero who, while canoeing through the city's flooded streets trying to help people, is arrested by soldiers on bogus looting charges and jailed for a month. The story follows Kathy Zeitoun's panic as she and the kids, who had evacuated, cannot reach him.

After the trial, Kathy Zeitoun said she believed Eggers accurately portrayed their relationship as he saw it; they managed to hide from the author their moments of abuse, she said, which grew worse and more frequent in later years. A planned animated movie based on the book was cancelled.